Jazz musicians learn and develop by listening as well as by playing. It doesn’t matter which starts first in my opinion, but I know that going to hear live jazz and exploring it on record and through radio have been vital aspects in my own musical growth. It has both excited me about the possibilities for my own music and taught me invaluable lessons of approach and execution. There may be exceptions – maybe – who have pursued a solitary path with originality and inventiveness. Even so they probably need other musicians to play with in order to fulfil their creative impulses, and in jazz ‘playing with’ has to mean ‘listening to’ in my book. What brings this to mind? I was recently the guest on Alan Musson’s excellent show ‘Jazz Kaleidoscope’ (The Bridge Radio) which afforded me the opportunity to choose almost two hours of music for the show. As you would expect, I spent a considerable time trawling through my CDs to put my playlist together. With so much to choose from I had to deal sternly with myself to arrive at a list that truly justified its selection. So what criteria carried the day? In the end there were two themes: one was to do with people crossing boundaries and playing in someone else’s yard. It’s more than ‘crossover’, which for me occasionally suggests cleverness without a further musical need or justification, like riding two bicycles at once. So for example ‘Hands’, Dave Holland’s collaboration with Spanish guitarist and head of Flamenco dynasty Pepe Habichuela; Dave confides in the liner notes that it took him a couple of years to work out what he should really play! Or Roland Kirk’s treatment of ‘Say A Little Prayer’, which expands a brilliant popular song into an anthem for Martin Luther King and all the tribulations of the African-American people, regretfully as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. The other strand was about me acknowledging those who inspired me, and whose creativity and artistry helped to illuminate my path as I was finding my way. This rather large number of artists comprises many American but also many British musicians. Thinking again about Jack Bruce, (see my post ‘Jack Bruce – Recollections and Reflections’) I was thrilled to rediscover on Gilles Peterson’s ‘Impressed Vol. 1’ the marvellous ‘Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe’ by the New Jazz Orchestra. Not only is Jack Bruce on double bass, helping to hold Neil Ardley’s superb...

Many people were saddened by the recent death of Jack Bruce. Bassists in particular have reason to acknowledge his influence and his passing. I certainly do. As a young man and beginning bassist in London in the 1960s I had opportunities to hear many fine players, both of double bass and electric bass. Ron Mathewson, Chris Laurence, Dave Green, Danny Thompson, Jeff Clyne and Harry Miller were among my favourite jazzers. They were readily ‘available’ at club gigs around London. Listening to Jazz Club on the radio I grew to identify some players by their sound alone, because in those days bass amplification had yet to arrive. (When it did, for a while everyone sounded like ‘Mr. Polytone’ or ‘Mr. Underwood’, or whoever made the next pick-up.) And this was without all the great American players I was also into. On electric bass there were some fine players too – Alex Dmochowski swung like no other beside the drummer Aynsley Dunbar, but Steve York, John McVie and Cliff Barton also come to mind. In the midst of this, in 1966 Cream arrived and exploded my sense of everything that might be possible. This configuration of genuine musical equals challenged the hierarchy implicit within many rock and jazz groups. The openness and symmetry of their power-house sound seemed perfect, while their playing was so free and adventurous, nothing was beyond their musical reach. They seemed well able to justify the egotistical band name and the ‘first supergroup’ tag. ‘Fresh Cream’ was constantly on the turntable at home and at parties, with its audacious writing, use of voices as instruments, and dispensing with the bass on occasions to allow Jack to play harmonica. (Play it? – he used it as a means of assault.) Rhythmically rock-solid yet fluid and innovative, blues-infused without being limited in form, lyrically inventive and intelligent, the album had so much, and it promised more. At the Saville Theatre show in February 1967 that ‘more’ presented itself in its full live glory, and at the bottom of it all was Jack’s bass with ‘that’ sound. In his hands it spoke, it sang, it growled; it drove, it probed, it challenged; it said restlessness, and conviction, and ‘why not?’ Above all it rejoiced in itself without regard for previous ideas of what the role of the bass ‘should’ be. And yet I would misrepresent Jack’s impact to portray it solely in terms of his bass-playing, when...